Cochise's new album Trench Town feels like going back to some old…coochie. He dropped it on June 19, his first full-length since 2024's Why Always Me?. Sixteen tracks, 34 minutes, out under Warriors Com LLC, landing just days after he posted a sprawling 14-minute freestyle called "SUM OFF MY CHEST." His base met it warmly. The user score on Album of the Year is sitting right in his usual range, and a few longtime listeners are calling it one of his better projects. This review lands colder.
You know exactly what you are getting before you press play. It scratches a familiar itch for about a minute. Then you are halfway through, bored, wondering why you came back to something you already left behind, telling yourself you will not do it again.
Trench Town is a rage record, and it is a rage record from a very specific moment. The Playboi Carti blueprint is all over it: blown-out 808s, vocals pushed into the red, hooks built on repetition and adrenaline instead of ideas. That formula was electric in 2021. Cochise rode it to a viral peak with "Hatchback" and a 2022 XXL Freshman spot, and for a year or two the chaos felt like the point. In 2026 it feels like a rerun.
The problem is not that the album is bad on its face. The beats hit, the energy is real, and the features add a little texture (Pradabagshawty on "TEST," Lelo on "GLORIOUS," 454 and Oodaredevil on "CUTLASS," TisaKorean on "SO MUCH FUN"). The problem is that nothing here moves the artist an inch past where he already was. Same flows, same screaming pockets, same bag of tricks emptied out for the fifth or sixth time.
That is the trap a lot of rage artists walk into. The sound runs on intensity, and intensity has a shelf life. When the novelty wears off and the writing has not deepened, what is left is noise you have heard before. Cochise can clearly make this music in his sleep. The question Trench Town raises is whether he can make anything else. Until he answers it, records like this one will keep landing and evaporating. It's a 3 out of 10.
Rage runs on hype cycles, and the streaming economy is built to reward the artists who keep feeding the same thing into the same machine. Volume over evolution. A coasting record and a great one get paid the same way, on the same delay, through the same splits nobody outside the label gets to see.
Signed Trade is building something different, and it is not live yet. The idea: you buy music directly from artists, with no label middlemen and no streaming-service skim. Every royalty split is public on an open ledger, traceable down to the dollar on every track. Artists get paid instantly, on every stream and every purchase, not on a quarterly delay. And every track carries a market cap that moves with how it actually performs, so fans can listen and invest in what is really connecting. A record that coasts gets priced like one.
Be early. Join the waitlist at https://signed.trade.
